Pages

About

This blog started on 11 March 2011, the day of the Tohoku Earthquake,with a brief e-mail entitled 'I'm OK' dispatched to close friends and family. The e-mail became a 'round robin' and after a week it started a new life as a blog.

I'm an English woman living in Koriyama, Fukushima prefecture, a place no one had ever heard of, but which was suddenly being mentioned in the same breath as Chernobyl. Initially, this blog was a record of those first weeks, a record of how ordinary people, me and the 100 staff who work in the corrugated box factory I inherited, coped in the aftermath of the earthquake.

Writing the blog was an outlet for me, helping to keep me sane, helping me work out at the end of the day what was happening around me. But after a few months it began to take on a life of its own. Fukushima faded from the headlines, even here in Japan, so it became something of a mission to let the world know what was going on here.

The blog has many followers, whose interest is humbling and much appreciated. Many people from around the world have added comments. Please take time to look at these. Some comments are critical, insinuating that I and the two million people who live here in Fukushima should get out. Other people have been supportive and contributed data which is reassuring to us.

I have no axe to grind. I'm just an ordinary person who happens by circumstance to live here. Yes, given the choice, I would like to be back in my home country but life is not so easy. I have staff, I have assets I need to protect, I have a living to make. People here are the same. Uncomplaining and cheerful, they get on with life. What else can you do? There are still many problems and the future is uncertain but little by little things are getting back to normal. Certainly I am a lot less worried than I was this time last year.

This is a beautiful part of the world and sometimes I take pictures of the countryside here. I hope you enjoy them too.